Saturday, June 26, 2010

Free U.S. National Park Maps in HIgh Resolution Formats

Travellers, campers, hikers, backpackers - U.S. National Park maps organized by state.

View and Download National Park Maps

Free TOPO Maps for Campers, Travellers, Backpackers and Hikers

Beautiful high resolution scans of original U.S. topographic maps. HINT: These can be loaded into the free GeoView 4.0. These are very large highly detailed high resolution images. It is best to right-click on the topo image link and download to your computer. Index map included.

View and Download Free 250K Topographic Maps

Niche Web Tip - Don't Lose Pages - Redirect

I'm constantly amazed at the number of web pages that go bad. Government, non-profit and commercial websites that seemingly have large budgets often have pages that go missing. It is very frustrating to click on an interesting link and end up at a page that says "404 not found." There is no good reason for this.

At MapCruzin I've tried to make sure that there are no lost pages. The reason I do this is that links exist forever. Who knows how many folks have bookmarked pages or linked to them from websites. Over the 14 years that MapCruzin has been online, I'm sure that there are many thousands.

The first fix, but not the best, is to redirect your "404 not found" to a real web page that will help visitors find what they are looking for. I do this at MapCruzin.com with this 404page.html. Instead of a page that goes nowhere, folks can search the website and hopefully find what they are looking for.

Better yet is to always redirect pages so that visitors never see your 404 page unless, of course, they type a url incorrectly or the link is configured wrong. If you have moved a page, redirect the old to the new. If you have deleted a page, redirect it to a related page.

Here's how I do these two redirects:

To redirect any "404 not found" to a real web page of your own design, first make a page and name it "404page.html." or anything you like. Then create a file named ".htaccess" in the root directory of your website if it does not already exist. The contents of the "htaccess" file should be "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.mapcruzin.com/404page.html." If you already have an ".htaccess" file, add the content to the existing file.

To redirect any webpage, replace the content of the old page with the following:

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Redirect</TITLE>

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.mapcruzin.com/">
</HEAD>

</body>
</html>

The "0" after "CONTENT=" denotes the length of time the server will pause on the page - I set this to zero so there is no pause at all. Place your new page url after "CONTENT="0";URL=".
In this example, the page is redirected to http://www.mapcruzin.com, but you can put any url in there that you like.

This should help lower the aggravation level of your visitors and keep them on your website a bit longer. After all, you've made a great deal of effort to create valuable content so it makes sense to take these relatively simple steps to assure that your visitors find it.

Monday, June 21, 2010

myRTK Toxic Maps and Information for Mobile Devices

Back in the 1990s MapCruzin.com created the interactive maps for EDF's Scorecard project. We were contracted to do this because we created the first U.S. based interactive toxic maps on the internet - the Santa Cruz Toxic Release Inventory. Several years ago EDF quit mapping toxics, but scorecard is still a viable source for health effects related to toxics. Since the EDF project, we have continued to map toxics. We did guite a bit of work for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and many projects as part of our interest in bringing Right-to-Know and toxic chemical facility release information to communities in easy-to-use formats.

Some of our outreach efforts include:

EPA myRTK Toxic Release Inventory for Mobile Devices myRight-to-know is an EPA Web application designed for mobile devices. This application takes existing EPA information and packages it in a format and with a level of detail that is appropriate for mobile devices and mobile users. For any location or address, myRTK maps nearby facilities that report to TRI, as well as large permit holders in the Air, Water or Hazardous Waste programs that are expected to produce, manage or release TRI-reportable chemicals. The application compares individual facility releases to releases by other facilities in the county, as well as to other facilities in the same industrial sector. myRTK also identifies the most serious facility non-compliance across the twelve most recent quarters of data for the three principal U.S. environmental statutes: the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
Read entire article at MapCruzin.com

Screenshots from myRTK Toxic Maps and Information for Mobile Devices

Recently EPA released their myRTK application for mobile devices. Here are some screentshots along with brief descriptions. Learn more about myRTK.



myRTK Introductory screen.




My search of "City of Industry, CA" returned this google map.




A click on the list button produced a list of the 29 facilities on the map.

 



Going back to the original map and zooming out resulted in many more facilities.




Now many more facilities are listed. The list always reflects the facilities show on map.




One way to view information about a facility is to click on the arrow to the right of its name. Doing so results in this screen.


View all myRTK screenshots and descriptions

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Free Download: Oil and Gas Field ArcGIS Shapefile Map Layers

Shapefile for the Coalbed Methane Panels

Shapefiles for field boundaries (2007), resources (2006), reserves and production (2006), and the top 100 methane emitting coal mines (2005)

Shapefile for the Shale Gas Plays

Shapefiles for basin boundaries

Shapefiles for play boundaries

Shapefile for the Regional Oil and Gas Field

Shapefile for the Powder River, Greater Green River, Uinta-Piceance, and Paradox-San Juan Basins plus Shapefile for the Montana Thrust Belt

Shapefile for the Appalachian Basin

Shapefiles for the Black Warrior Basin, Denver Basin, Wyoming Thrust Belt, National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska plus the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge 1002 Area, and the South Florida Peninsula

Shapefiles for the Eastern Great Basin, Eastern Oregon and Washington, Alaskan North Slope, Alaska's Cook Inlet, Ventura Basin, and Williston Basin

MapCruzin.com is an independent firm specializing in the publication of educational and research resources. We created the first U.S. based interactive toxic chemical facility maps on the internet in 1996 and we have been online ever since. Learn more about us and view some of our projects and services.

Download Oil and Gas Field GIS Shapefile Map Layers